An Outsider’s Voice
Dreze is the consummate insider, uniquely entitled to tell the nominally Anglophone urban Indian about these rural realities
On the matter of rural India, Jean Dreze enjoys a unique intellectual and moral authority. Equipped with the finest academic training, he has demonstrated a durable existential commitment by actually living among the destitute and the landless about whom so many conscientious others are content to merely write about, from a distance. As such, Rumble in a Village, co-authored by Luc Leruth “with” Jean Dreze, commands attention.
In a preface, Dreze explains that the origins of this novel lie in the field notes he accumulated as a young post-doc, in a village called Palanpur, in Uttar
Pradesh’s Moradabad district back in 1983-84. The “field notes” have been equipped with a thin fictional device—it is 1984 and a London-based banker, Anil, is persuaded to return to his ancestral village, Palanpur, because an uncle has been murdered, his English girlfriend Pat has academic ambitions about researching among rural women in India, and because Anil is an amateur photographer who plans to use the visit to build a portfolio. So far, so contrived. Naturally, Anil makes “notes” during the course of his visit. And, by a happy coincidence, his father too had made detailed notes about the historical background of
Palanpur! The “novel” essentially splices together these two sets of “notes”. So one ends up knowing a lot about Palanpur past and present, but it doesn’t add up to a novel, alas.
I have been trying to figure out why this is so. Dreze is the consummate insider, uniquely entitled to tell the nominally Anglophone urban Indian about these rural realities. And yet, the novel chooses to adopt the narrative voice of an NRI outsider. The effect is both curious, and stale—as if India is being observed for a foreign audience, with that air of distant, patronising amusement which one knows from NRI narratives.
The manner of dealing with sex is deliciously coy. I can’t make out whether this is a concession to the sensitivities of allegedly prudish Indian readers or a new, post-lib trend. Here’s an example: “She was obviously happy with me and demonstrated it to our mutual satisfaction. I have been thoroughly well educated in matters related to such satisfaction and I would never turn my back and go off to sleep although I did not mind Pat doing so.”
Such delights add a whole new level of interest to the field notes of social scientists. ■